From the Introduction
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If Criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a
political position on a particular question, and if it is
to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its
identity is its difference from other cultural activities
and from systems of thought or of method. In its suspicion
of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects,
in its impatience with guilds, special interest, imperialized
fifedoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most
itself and, if the paradox
can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts
turning into organized dogma.
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic